[Sidenote: The ideas of citizenship and public questions.]

With modern education and the awakening of the Indian mind have come
entirely new political ideas. That there are public questions has in
fact been discovered; for in India the idea of citizenship, the
consciousness of being a political unit, was itself a new idea. We may
say that it was made possible in 1835, when an Act of Legislature was
passed declaring the press free. In 1823 an English editor had been
deported from Calcutta for free criticism of the authorities, but after
1835 it was legal not merely to think but to speak on public questions.
Before we pass on, we note the strange inverted sequence of events which
may attend on fostered liberty. The right to criticise was bestowed
before any right to be represented in the Legislature or Executive was
enjoyed. In this freedom to criticise the acts of Government, the India
of to-day is far ahead of countries like Germany and Russia.

[Sidenote: Government exists for the good of the governed.]

The new idea of citizenship, thus made possible by a free press, is
largely the outcome of three great influences. Christian philanthropic
ideas, disseminated both by precept and example, could not but be
producing some sense of brotherhood, and what Burke calls a "civil
society." Then again, the free and often democratic spirit of English
literature was being imbibed by thousands; and in the third place,
through the newspapers, English and vernacular, the people were being
brought into actual contact with the political life of Great Britain.
Due particularly to the first of these influences, the noblest of the
new Indian political ideas is that tacitly assumed in many of the native
criticisms of the British Government in India--high tribute as well as
criticism--that Government exists for the good of the governed, and